Dad's repertoire was limited – I can remember mince and chips, beef stew which my brothers called "Dad's gruel" enlivened with a packet of pot herbs from the greengrocer's, but best of all was hot meat pie with gravy.

Kay points out that that statement runs against nearly anything that the now-defunct Soviet-era Communist regimes really wanted; it is a gesture of the greengrocer's intention to signal conformity and avoid trouble.

His father had filled one sketchbook with drawings of fruit and vegetables so painstakingly detailed that at first glance they could be mistaken for black-and-white photographs, almost a greengrocer's catalogue, each specimen on display from various angles — above, below, tilted in all sorts of ways — as well as segmented, peeled, halved, sliced.